William Hazelgrove’s Rocket Man is simply superb. He captures the essence of suburban hypocrisy with such aplomb that it is almost impossible to give another person an idea of how good this book is without blurting out, “Just read the damn thing!” Especially if that person never actually experienced this great wonder we call suburbia.

The story, strictly speaking, is about a man whose marriage and relationship with his son is falling apart due to the weight of unrealistic expectations of what a man, marriage, and family should be. Financial stress, combined with having to pretend one is something they are not, comes to a head when Dale Hammer’s out-of-work father shows up at his doorstep.

If Dale is not Ward Cleaver, it is a safe bet that his wife, Wendy – who has been conspiring with their neighbor to generate divorce papers, is far from June. Dale is a former aspiring writer who, ironically, can’t close a sale on a house, while Wendy is a lawyer, who, for some reason or another, stands idly by and refuses to work as their life continues its descent.

The title comes form a scouting activity in which Dale becomes the “Rocket Man,” the scout leader who fires off all of the kids’ rockets during the ever popular Rocket Day. The book features a happy ending when Dale, in one final act of defiance, “blows up” the myth of the American Dream and the lie his life has become.

Rocket Man does not spew venom. Instead, it very subtly forces the reader to question his or her values and challenges anyone who has ever confused some monstrosity of a house in a subdivision where everyone pretends to be “just like them” with the American Dream. There is a fine line between freedom and slavery.

Highly recommended.

Dave Moyer

A review copy was provided by the publisher. Dave Moyer is the author of Life and Life Only: A Novel.

It’s 1960. You’re a young girl living in a quiet suburb of Milwaukee, in a community whose foundation is the Feelin’ Good Cookie Factory (the closer one lives to the odoriferous factory, the poorer one’s family is), with your cunning sister Troo. The problem is that the adults in the community seem to be clueless to the problems in their midst, including juvenile delinquency. Troo’s reporting of the troublemaker known as Greasy Al means that he’s been sent to a juvenile detention facility, which seems like good news until you find out from your police detective step-dad-to-be (he’s engaged to your mother) that the evil kid has escaped. Now it’s up to Troo to come up with a perfect plan for dealing with Greasy Al’s imminent return.

As Troo’s sister, you know that she’s no amateur when it comes to this business. You previously had a problem with a male summer camp counselor, and Troo made him disappear from the face of the earth. So now you’re hoping that Troo’s plan for Greasy Al is not too efficient… And just when you’re dealing with this, you learn from other kids in the neighborhood that one of the respected pillars of the community is making young boys “do bad things,” which immediately changes everything. Now Troo puts Plan A on the back-burner while she develops a new plan to bring law and order to your town.

You and Troo must rely on a couple of other youngsters to help you – one male and one female – and you have to hope that they can keep their lips sealed forever if Troo’s new solution works. You both think you can count on Artie and Mary Lane, especially the latter since: “She’s been tortured by the best in the world – nuns. So detectives asking her a couple of questions wouldn’t bother her at all.”

Good Graces, written in a child’s voice, is simply one of the most enjoyable novels that I’ve read in years (at least three or more). Kagen’s ability to write in an adolescent’s voice is remarkable, and she has fun toying with the artifacts of the time, such as the TV shows Queen for a Day and Howdy Doody. Adult readers who grew up in less prosperous homes will identify with the characters, as will Catholics and lapsed Catholics. The young characters in the tale attend Catholic school and learn that the nuns can indeed inflict pain when it’s needed and otherwise.

At its base, this is a fine and fun morality play in which children save a community and the almost-brainless adults are never the wiser. It’s the sequel to Whistling in the Dark, and I can hardly wait for the third part of Lesley Kagen’s true justice trilogy.

Highly recommended.

Joseph Arellano

A review copy was provided by the publisher. “Moving, funny, and full of unexpected delights… Kagen crafts a gorgeous page-turner about love, loss, and loyalty, all told in the sparkling voices of two extraordinary sisters.” Caroline Leavitt, author of Pictures of You.

Ever wondered about your next door neighbors? You would if you lived next door to the Radleys. This seemingly ordinary family consisting of a father, mother, and two teenagers – a boy and a girl, is not what they appear to be. Yes, the father is a doctor and the kids are students at the local school. Mom belongs to a book club and they live in a very nice house. Every family has its black sheep and the Radleys are no exception.

The truth is that mom and dad are non-practicing vampires. They swore off killing and living forever many years ago, exited the happening vampire scene in London and moved to the suburbs. Dr. Radley’s brother is a high living, trouble making, practicing vampire who does not age and makes no pretense about living the life. The kids are clueless as to their family background. Maybe the aversion to sunshine, pallid skin color and peculiar longings should have been clues?

If you’re new to the recent vampire craze in literature as is this reviewer, the mechanics of being a vampire would be somewhat confused and clouded by ancient stories and movies from the Bella Lugosi era. The Radleys provides abundant information regarding traditions, practices and popular culture vampires – think Jim Morrison. This charming satire captures the romance of the Harry Potter stories and, while emotion filled, it is not the least bit sappy.

Author Matt Haig is highly imaginative in his development of the story line and details. His characterizations and plot interactions are nearly believable. The references to famous vampires are also nearly believable. While this book is not one that the average person might gravitate toward at their local bookseller, it is well worth seeking out. After all, if an engaging human interest story can take one away from the daily grind, this one will transport the reader to another dimension!

Highly recommended.

This review was written by Ruta Arellano. A review copy was received from the publisher.

The Neighbors are Watching: A Novel by Debra Ginsberg (Crown; $23.99; 325 pages)

“It was as if Gloria was sabotaging herself, Sam thought. Well, they were both sabotaging themselves, just going about it from opposite directions.”

Debra Ginsberg has populated her latest novel with a score of self-sabotaging and dysfunctional characters. This is the story of Diana, a young pregnant woman who is thrown out of her mother’s home and forced to live with the father she’s never known. Dad Joe lives in the suburbs of San Diego near the ocean with his second wife, Allison. Joe made Allison abort her only pregnancy years earlier, and Allison knows nothing about the existence of Diana. Therefore, when she appears on Joe’s driveway the marriage is suddenly in serious trouble.

But it turns out that everyone in the neighborhood is in trouble as the fires of late October and early November 2007 approach. Fourteen people died and at least 70 were injured when a half-million acres burned. One million San Diego County residents were evacuated, the largest evacuation in California history. This is the not-so-pleasant back-drop for Ginsberg’s troubled tale.

It appears that all of the neighbors in Joe’s suburban community have their serious quirks and troubles. There’s a sometimes-happy and sometimes-bickering lesbian couple, Sam and Gloria, and a heterosexual married couple, the Werners, whose son Kevin is a lazy weed smoker with no intellectual or athletic skills. This is a ‘hood that is seemingly over-populated with drug users and abusers. One has to wonder how accurate a reflection this is of America’s Finest City and its residents.

The one exception to the group of losers is an Asian couple, whose quiet son shoots hoops and practices the piano for hours on end. This is a stereotype of sorts, although it’s one that was likely not meant to be offensive. However, Ginsberg includes a highly troubling reference to Diana, who happens to be half African-American. Early on, Kevin’s mother refers to Diana as “an uppity pregnant girl who had no business even being in the neighborhood in the first place.” This is offensive on two counts – first, in using a term that is knowingly offensive to African-Americans, and also in the implication that there’s a “place” within which people of a certain color are not welcome.

Perhaps Ginsberg intended this non-P.C. reference to serve as a reminder of the destructiveness of racism, but she could and should have adopted a more subtle and temperate way of expressing that notion. Another flaw with the telling is that Ginsberg chooses the rather unfortunate name of Joe Montana for Diana’s father, which makes it seem like some kind of inside joke. “Joe Montana, like the football player?” Yes.

One of the key problems with Neighbors is that the story is made needlessly complex. When Diana surfaces with disastrous consequences for her father’s and stepmother’s marriage, the storyline seems logical. But then Ginsberg takes it further – Joe suddenly has an affair with a young neighbor and Diana hooks up with Kevin, the worst possible choice for her. More is not always better.

There’s this dividing line… A dividing line between the fictional account which feels to a reader like real life, and the feeling that it’s a good effort but there’s a sense of magic that’s lacking. Ginsberg produced a fine attempt in this novel but it struck this reader as a manuscript rather than as a fully developed work. It needed some editing, trimming and rethinking. All in all, the author seemed to be sabotaging herself like the characters in her dysfunctional fictional neighborhood.

This review was written by Joseph Arellano. A review copy was provided by the publisher.

This is the first novel by Emily Gray Tedrowe and it may gain her admission into the club of today’s best women writers. At one point in Commuters, a character goes on vacation and takes with her “a satisfyingly quiet Anne Tyler novel.” Anne Tyler, Anna Quindlen, and Jennifer Weiner are just three of the popular authors whose influence can be observed in Commuters.

Commuters deals with the lives of individuals who, while they live in a quiet one-square-mile suburb, are only a train ride away from the hustle and bustle of Manhattan. It is also about the way people’s lives change – sometimes instantly – when their partners and family members experience tragedy or opportunity.

The story begins with the marriage of seventy-eight-year-old Winnie Easton to Jerry Travis, a wealthy businessman from Chicago. Winnie and Jerry (a widow and widower) had met once while both were in their twenties attending a wedding, and now each is taking a chance on this late in life pairing. For Winnie, the act of getting married to Jerry may be her first taste of true freedom: “She had married once because it was a good match, mostly for her parents and his… But now she found herself about to do something that felt like the first thing she’d ever done on her own… She was marrying a man for the delicious and wicked and simple reason that she wanted to.”

Winnie and Jerry’s children, grandchildren, and in-laws all, of course, have their own strong opinions about the wisdom of their joining together for better or worse. In Commuters, the story is told from Winnie’s viewpoint; from that of her distracted and tired daughter Rachel (whose one-time lawyer husband has recovered from a serious accident); from the perspective of her angry daughter-in-law Annette, who views Winnie as an opportunistic gold-digger; and from the perspective of Avery, Jerry’s troubled grandson.

Each of these individuals has hopes and dreams – Avery for example wants to be the owner-chef of his own restaurant in Brooklyn – which may rely, in part, on securing some of Jerry’s fortune via inheritance. Winnie becomes a wild card thrown into the game that forces everyone to scramble and re-evaluate their positions vis-a-vis Jerry. The well-planned timetables for getting on Jerry’s good side are now thrown out of whack; even more so when Annette elects to sue her father for the control of his business and Jerry’s mental and physical health begins to fade.

Tedrowe does a remarkable job of telling this story from four different perspectives. All sound like true voices and a wrong note is never heard. The author incorporates a couple of sex scenes in a way that is subtle, unlike so many of today’s popular fiction writers who drop in such scenes in an attempt to enliven boring narratives.

Each of the narrators in Commuters encounters either unexpected opportunity or tragedy, regardless of their age, maturity or economic standing in life. This novel informs us that dealing with family and dealing with money are two equal challenges. And then there’s the matter of love, which does always win in the end.

Commuters also tells us that we’re seeing the emergence of a great new talent in Tedrowe. Let us hope that she keeps up her craft. If so, her name may one day be mentioned alongside that of another highly gifted writer, Anne Lamott.

“A sad fact, of course, about adult life is that you see the very things you’ll never adapt to on the horizon.”

“I’m the man who counsels abandonment of those precious things you remember but can no longer make hopeful use of.”

The genre of the suburban angst novel was likely created by John Updike’s 1960 novel Rabbit Run. That was the story of Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, a superb athlete and high school basketball star who finds that his life has peaked at the age of 26. Angstrom’s solution was basically to run away from the obligations of adulthood and family.

Updike has certainly received a great deal of praise as one of the best American writers; although to me each of the three books in the Rabbit trilogy came off as flat and tired. Updike’s genius may lie in the fact that this was precisely what he intended.

Move ahead to the year 1995 and second-time author Richard Ford (The Sportswriter) moves the category along by leaps and bounds with the release of Independence Day. Come the new year, this novel will be 20 years old but it reads as if it was written just last month. Frank Bascombe, a divorced former newspaper sportswriter, is living in his ex-wife’s house attempting to get by as a realtor. This at a time when there’s a significant (early 90’s) recession, rapidly falling real estate values and high unemployment levels. Employment down, building down, rents low, cost to buy high: “… dug in for the long night that becomes winter.” Sound familiar?

Bascombe has decided that the best times in his life have – like his former spouse – left him behind. “Why should you only get what you want? Life’s never like that.” So Bascombe simply resolves to get through, to keep living, during his self-titled Existence Period.

At first the reader – not knowing any better – accepts Frank Bascombe as a depressed 53-year-old man who thinks things like, “When you’re young, your opponent is the future. When you’re not young, your opponent’s the past and everything done in it…”. But eventually we realize that Frank’s actually an optimist – “It’s my experience that when you don’t think you’re making progress that you’re probably making plenty.”

As we read this 451-page novel, we see that Bascombe is making progress in pushing the re-start button on his life. He’s not a bad person, really, it’s just that he has his own way of looking at things – one of the small points on which his ex-wife and his troublesome girlfriend can agree on. Like a writer, he looks at things and sees something different from real actual life. “You might never have been quite as happy as you like to believe you were.”

Bascombe is often let down, unfortunately, by the other people in his life, like one of his post-divorce female partners: “… she had very little facility for actually thinking about me and never in the time we knew each other asked me five questions about my children or my life before I met her.” Yet we somehow sense that Frank will be blessed with the victory of what Bob Dylan called “simple survival.”

How good, exactly, is this piece of American literature? In 1995, The New York Times included it in the year-end list of best books. As 1996 began, Ford was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for Independence Day. This Frank Bascombe novel (like John Updike’s Rabbit books) was part of a trilogy, but don’t worry about what came before or after.

Independence Day was Ford’s singular masterpiece, his van Gogh, his Sunflowers painting. Or The Starry Night.

First the positives. A Friend of the Family, a novel by Lauren Grodstein, tells quite an intriguing story. This is a tale about a doctor who, through a minor omission on his part, lets a patient of his die from an undiagnosed condition. The pulling of this thread causes the fabric of his previously secure and comfortable life to come apart; the set up has parallels to Carol Cassella’s fine novel Oxygen. In this case, the physician is a male in his early fifties and Grodstein does a quite commendable job of getting us to believe the man’s voice (sometimes not the case with female authors).

The plot line would have been fine for a medical-legal drama… Dr. Pete Dizinoff has made a mistake that threatens a reputation it has taken him a lifetime to build. His best friend, a medical specialist, is not only aware of Dr. Dizinoff’s error, he in fact urged him to order a test that might have saved the life of his young woman patient. Will his friend protect him or turn on him?

Unfortunately, the author fails to be content with this straight forward story line, so subplots are added – the main one being a possible romantic relationship between Dr. Dizinoff’s 20-year-old son and the troubled 30-year-old daughter of his best friend – and things get confusing and hard to follow. There’s also a debate about the value of life in the suburbs. Dr. Dizinoff thinks, “Evening in the garden of good and suburban… Suburbs, man. I don’t care what anybody says. It’s the only way to live.” Yes, the main character is quite satisfied with living in the suburban community of Round Hill. Contra, the young woman who may be involved with his son says, “Isn’t the whole point of (living in) Round Hill that you can be gone for ten years and not miss a thing?” But these issues are not the biggest problem with the narrative.

The story told here would likely have been a fascinating one if it had been told in simple chronological order. Instead, like an overly clever Hollywood film, the story starts in the present, with abrupt (even neck whiplashing) movements to events that happened three, four, thirty and even forty or so years in the past. Each time a new chapter or sub-chapter begins the reader is forced to ask, “So where are we now?”

I’m not at all sure what’s the supposed appeal of this style of quick-cut and retro-scene storytelling. I just know and believe that the story got lost in the complexity of its telling.

I considered adding a few comments about what Grodstein’s characters tell us about life, but this time I’ll refrain from doing so. There are some gems and rewards for the reader, to be sure. This reader just hopes that the clearly talented Laura Grodstein keeps it simpler the next time around.

A Friend of the Family will be released by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill on Tuesday, November 11, 2009.